Daisy Chained Ethernet or Serial for Raspberry PI

[HHumbert]

Hi Network Guys ...

I'm working on a project for networking approx 2500 Raspberry PI devices in a theater. They need to be networked, and because of space reasons in the conduit, doing a home run arrangement isn't really feasible. Some rows have 25 seats in them and making a home run would make that cable pretty fat.

What would be the recommendation? Does 10Base-2 even make sense anymore, and especially on a raspberry PI? Maybe some sort of serial bus protocol that you can run SLIP on?

Ideally, if we only have say 2-3 wires, I was thinking of some sort of serial line bus arrangement with each PI having an address in the row. The throughput requirements are very low and could likely be handled by, say, a 19.2K modem 🙂

What would some recommendations? Thanks in advance!

 

[sdifox]

Wifi not feasible? RPI3 comes with wifi. Or small switch per section then uplink to main switch. Dont think USB would be feasible given the distance involved.

Bigger problem is powering all of them. Maybe those usb battery banks? but you need one that will supply 2.5A

 

[mxnerd]

Also thinking Wi-Fi. Or probably flat ethernet cables.

But maybe you can ask Raspberry see if they have any suggestions.

 

[sdifox]

Also thinking Wi-Fi. Or probably flat ethernet cables.

But maybe you can ask Raspberry see if they have any suggestions.

This is a wiring issue, not an RPI issue :biggrin:

 

[mxnerd]

This is a wiring issue, not an RPI issue :biggrin:

If vendor wants to sell 2500 pieces to a customer, better give customer some ideas. That's called Pre-sales consultation. ^_^

 

[Sheep221]

Also thinking Wi-Fi. Or probably flat ethernet cables.

But maybe you can ask Raspberry see if they have any suggestions.

I definitely don't recommend going flat ethernet, induction in the cable would cause high interference resulting in packet loss and input errors.

 

[mxnerd]

Since OP mentioned low speed for the connections, nowadays there are flat ethernet cables that also use twisted pairs, maybe can get away with the interference?